Uhm, you don't see other languages doing this because most tend to not be owned by a single corporation the way Java is owned by Oracle.

Erm, C# and Microsoft? Anyway, funny spoof vids are a legacy of Sun and its partners that Oracle hasn't yet managed to stomp out (I think IBM corporate might actually have a better sense of humor than Oracle). Actually Microsoft has been known to make quite a few just like these, but they keep them internal and don't circulate them widely (the ones that get out are the embarassing ones from the early 90's like Windows 386).

Nothing quite compares to this one though, featuring the inimitable Alan Ford (it's another JavaZone one, not officially Oracle). The preview frame's subtitle might give you a hint that this isn't the best thing to have on speakers at work

I don't understand what it is about, what it excels, what the real uses are, and why there's someone giving time to make this scheme thing.

Same thing could be said about any language. Tell me again why the world really needed Java? (hint: it didn't invent bytecode). Anyway, scheme's got a well-documented history, did start with a pretty specific purpose (implementing the Actor model), found its way to other purposes (teaching general computing), and by virtue of having been around longer than most people around here have been alive, isn't really concerned with judgements on its merits made by you or me. That said, there's probably more scheme implementations than useful scheme apps in the wild.

Specifically what it's good at is being a lisp implementation that at least until recently was pretty simple (R4RS was just 50 pages, the common lisp hyperspec is over 1000 pages). Even in that small spec, it demands things lisp doesn't, like tailcall elimination and continuations. Some point to that as holding scheme back, but most schemers would claim that they're essential to allow any scheme implementation to express things the essential "scheme way". So go read or watch SICP and realize you're probably not going to be writing a general fixpoint function in java or common lisp anytime soon. Of course you can write one in Haskell, I dare say even more elegantly, but I'd still say scheme is a tad more approachable.

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